This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://blog.wizemail.co.uk/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.wizemail.co.uk/feeds/posts/default.

Layout

Valuable though it is, time spent on the design and layout of your email marketing gives excellent return on investment. It is, after all, the interface between you and the customers. No matter how good the product, no matter how low the price, if the email fails to engage then you fail to sell.

There are few hard and fast rules in graphic design. The biggest criticism of any advertisement is that it is staid. The templates that come with good quality email marketing software are broad and allow a great deal of flexibility. However there are a number of basics that you should ignore only with good reason. Here are five:

Don’t make them look for the big picture
A number of your recipients will read the email without the picture being displayed. Some email clients will display a blank square at the original size of the image. If your rather dramatic picture went across the whole page then your reader will be presented with space. Alt tags can be useful but they do not grab the attention of the reader.

Get in quick
The email is not a story. It is not meant to entertain so do not go for the slow build up with the surprise dénouement at the end. Whilst you might save the cherry on the cake until the last mouthful this is not a good idea with direct marketing emails. Readers scan, looking for information. Or, more likely, looking for reasons to delete. You need to get over in the first few words that you have something that will excite them.

Don’t waffle
Whilst the limitations of the A4 format are for other forms of marketing, the fact that you can go on and on is no reason to. The email needs to make the person click through. If you go into lots of detail then you risk boring the reader or having them interrupted by someone else or indeed their own thoughts. They will then delete the email.

Plan everything
The images and text should be integrated, one leading on to the other in order to keep the customer interested. We do not want him thinking of all the work he has to do. With mundane items, such as vacuum cleaners, explain and then show. If it is Ayers Rock then a moody sunset might do better coming first.

Prioritise
You should know your customers so work out what will interest them and emphasise it. Put it first, in text and image. A brochure is not the easiest item to encourage someone to download but an article on the new marina in one of the Greek islands might tempt. First tell them about it, show them a picture or two and then tell them that further information is available in the brochure. All they have to do is click through.

There are no limits in direct email marketing but there is good advice.

What is the alternative?

Alt and Title Tags

Moore’s Law states that the speed of processors will double every two years or so. It seems odd therefore that when designing in direct email marketing you have to consider systems which cannot, for various reasons, display images when reading emails. It can give the feeling of a retrograde step.

If you use professional email marketing software you will generally be given the ability to attach alt and/or title tags to your images and it is easy to become confused as to which does what. Tags are is essence instructions in hyper-text mark-up language (html) to a browser or email service provider. These are defined within the signs <>.

In the case of images it will give a location where the image can be found, hence the term image tag. But it can do other things as well. For those engaged in direct email marketing, it should.

There is an ever expanding choice of ways to access emails. Most of the more recent types will not display images in emails. Any presented might be shown as a blank space in the original image size or else a small X or similar.

If your email depends on understanding of the picture then all is not lost.

Alt and title tags provide a way of overcoming the problem. Firstly to explain the difference between the alt and title tags for email purposes: if either one is used it will be shown. If both are used the title tag will be displayed.

Instead of the blank or X the tag text will be shown. The only question for you is what you want to be displayed.

Captions for images are not that good an idea. Images should be self explanatory in emails as readers scan. Do not expect them to read captions. Your image will have some relevance so this is what your tag should show.

If you were advertising travel insurance with a picture of theft of a wallet, then might seem to be best. Do not describe the image, concentrate on its function.

Judgement

One of the best ideas is to pinch other people’s. Copyright law means that some work still remains to be done but in general the difficult bit is already completed. All you have to do is pick the right email to copy.

What makes a good email is all but impossible to define as there are so many variables. Good quality email marketing software will provide guidance and probably wizards to help you through the design stage but these will only be able to go so far. In any case, you do not want to be just be part of a crowd.

Subscribe to a few direct email marketing lists, preferably those in which you have some interest, and study them while trying to put yourself in the place of its target audience. Ask yourself if they fulfilled their function.

The first thing an email needs to do is to keep the recipient reading. If you became bored and disinterested then the design team failed. Do not merely reject that one as most recipients would. In order to get something from the exercise you need to work out why it did not engage you.

A tutor at my art college dissected an advertisement of mine in front of the class. He praised its overall appearance, its design and especially the graphics. The imagery was modified art deco and had taken me weeks to perfect. The tutor mentioned that the product was designed for those who would have been 20-30 in the early 50s, people to whom it would have been old fashioned.

As he pointed out, I had missed my target audience by a generation.

If the email bored you then the probable reason would have been that it was poorly targeted. A picture of a town centre busy with night life and clubbers strolling past is probably not high on the list of the picture editor for holidays for the retired.

When designing the email consider to whom you are sending it. As my tutor said, it is not the time to be self indulgent no matter how pretty the result.

Imagery Part Two

Most email marketing software solutions will provide wizards for the design of emails. They will suggest arrangements of text and images which will be perfectly adequate. But you should want more. Wizards are there for guidance and should not be seen as prescriptive.

You will be given options for the location of a picture but the choice of image will be down to you. Remember that it is not there merely to add a bit of colour to the page. That could be done in other ways. Nor is it there just to look pretty. It has a role, a function that it must perform.

The overriding purpose of the email is to get the recipient to do something, perhaps click through to a landing page, subscribe to your newsletter or maybe just to be aware of your presence. Everything else, if indeed there is anything else, should be subservient to this prime function. So you should judge your image on this factor only. Everything else is fluff.

The main danger to all emails, once opened, is the ease at which it can be deleted. Most people know the keyboard shortcut so keeping them reading has to be the major consideration. Pictures can be paramount in this.

Readers of emails do not, despite the description, read them. They scan. They will do this in the preview pane and the email proper. Glorious prose with careful scene setting and a gradual build up toward the dénouement is of no use. It must be a blitz, straight between the eyes.

Your logo is an important reassurance to the reader that he knows the source of the email. But it will be subliminal, hardly worthy of the word glance. The subject line of the email would have prepared the reader for the heading. The next bit is all important.

The fact that they opened the email suggests that they have some interest, or even just a hope, regarding what the email is all about. Their eyes would have gone over the logo and heading with the briefest of pauses before falling on the picture.

There are limitations on your choice of image. It must be:

• Relevant,
• Simple enough to grab the attention instantly,
• Exciting for the reader.

Relevant: if your clientele is sophisticated then a picture of the Taj Mahal supporting a holiday in Mumbai might inspire them to read something else. Any non sequitur will grate.

Simple: a reader will glance at it before moving on so it needs to be capable of being understood in an instant. Too much detail means that it will be ignored.

Anticipation: the picture should not be an end in itself. It must hint at something so that the reader will want to know what comes next. It should lead onto the text.

The choice of image is a critical one. Don’t just go for one that looks attractive to you. Consider its function. It needs to engage the reader and in an instant.

Imagery

It has become fashionable to blame spammers for all difficulties experienced by those engaged in legitimate email marketing and for very good reason. Here comes another.

Images are a very effective method of gaining the attention and exciting the anticipation of those reading direct marketing emails. However, spammers have used the evidence of images downloaded from servers when an email is opened as proof of a live address.

It is the norm for email clients to automatically block images for the majority of messages. As it is unlikely that your subscribers will place your email address on their safe senders list, even with easy unblocking methods it can be seen that emails must be designed to take into account the fact that images might not been seen.

It can be easy to become carried away with the ease of creating vivid and exciting emails with modern email marketing software but care needs to be exercised. It is best to avoid building your text from blocks of images as if they are not downloaded readers will get little but the endorsements at the bottom.

One way of overcoming, at least to an extent, the problem of blocked images is to embed them. They are sent in a similar manner to attachments and are therefore not blocked by the email client. But this is not without its own problems.

Embedded images will increase the size of the message and many firewalls, and ISPs, will block emails which are large or have more than one attachment. Some web-mail companies, such as Hotmail, might not display embedded images. So which way should you jump?

Email marketing software will include some form of database management, a way of collating and assessing the returned data when sending emails. This will provide direction as to which way to go.

Much will depend on the type and size of your client list. To an extent, albeit a very variable one, most of your clients will have features in common. If your product is very specific then they might be difficult to tell apart. This can be taken too far as, for example, stair lifts would, on the surface, appear to be applicable to two distinct groups: the aged and the disabled. However, the question you should ask yourself if who buys them.

But if they are likely to be similar then a test sample might be the way to go. Pick a percentage at random and try embedded and non-embedded images. The open rate will tell you of the better option for your customer demographics.

If your client list is more catholic then it might be the better option to send out an email to all with embedded images and ascertain the open rates. Those customers who did not open the email could then be sent the one without them.

It is worth the effort though. An image can engage the reader and so encourage further reading. All you need to do is pick the right one and send it out in the right way.

Why go pro

You might wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, what can be so difficult about sending emails. Most of us do it every day. So what is the point of opting for a company providing email marketing software?

There are a number of significant differences between direct mail and email marketing. Although the reduction in costs per person contacted is what most advertising highlights, and quite rightly, there are more compelling reasons for going digital.

It is the same with all aspects of business: Effective management is essential and good quality email marketing software will provide support in the technical and creative areas of email marketing. It should include:

• Campaign management
• Legal compliance
• Email creation
• List management
• Statistics acquisition and collation

Those new to these procedures might well find the obligations, advantages and technical requirements easy to miss. Any quality professional company supplying email marketing software will have systems to ensure that all such details are covered and in a manner that requires little technical knowledge.

Take statistics acquisition and collation. Not the most exciting of titles you probably think. You might be wondering why you need to know so much.

Your marketing email should not be released into the ether and forgotten. It responds to following and checking. Over and above knowing how many emails have been sent, you will be told how many have been opened. If this figure is disappointing then you know you must improve the way it is presented to the recipient. If it is reassuringly high then you know you can concentrate on other aspects.

The same goes for the number of clickthroughs, those forwarded etc. This should be broken down so that you know what each recipient did and did not do. You will know how many ‘hard’ bounces your had, i.e. how many addresses are invalid, and how many opted to unsubscribe from your list.

Such detail allows you to concentrate your efforts on those aspects that are performing poorly. It also allows you modify your product so that it reflects the taste of your customers.